The God of new beginnings and second chances

Posted on March 1, 2012 Written by Mark McIntyre Leave a Comment

Failure is a part of daily life. The best we can do is to keep the failures small, but failures they are none-the-less.

The question is not whether we will fail, but how we will respond to failure.

Every motivational speaker will tell you that the best way to respond to failure is to pick yourself up and keep moving. Learn from the failure and move forward. There is some truth to this. Yet our moral failures require more than just getting up and trying again.

Even a casual reading of the Sermon on the Mount will provide the understanding that from God’s point of view, sin is an internal process that sometimes works it’s way into outward behavior. The sin of lust can sometimes lead to adultery. Inappropriate anger can sometimes lead to murder. The moral failure happens before the external action.

The Bible records the colossal failures of some of the heroes of the faith. Abraham twice lied about his wife and nearly caused international incidents on both occasions. Isaac perpetrated the same lie about his wife with similar result. David committed adultery and covered it up with murder. Peter denied Jesus three times. Paul began his career as a bounty hunter bringing Christians to persecution and death.

All of these men, like us, have experienced failure. They each have also experienced forgiveness and restoration. They were in relationship with the God of second chances. God promises to forgive when we confess and repent (1 John 1:9).

The restoration of Peter in John chapter 21 is illustrative of this. Not only did Jesus restore Peter to fellowship, he gave him a ministry of caring for the church that was about to be born. Tend my lambs is what Jesus commanded Peter to do. Jesus did not excuse Peter’s behavior but gave him the opportunity to move beyond it. Not only did he get to move beyond it, he was also able to be a key figure in the growth of the early church.

I should point out that the major difference between the Peter of the courtyard (Matthew 26:69-75) and Peter the street preacher (Acts 2:14 ff) is that the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples (including Peter) and empowered them for ministry.

God uses our failures to help us to learn humility and dependence upon him. This humility and dependence is the foundation on which the ministry can then be built. Perhaps failure is the only sure path to humility.

Since our God is the God of second chances and he has given us the opportunity for restoration, we need to be the people of second chances. Being the knuckleheads we sometimes are, we are bound to hurt each other. When this happens we need to forgive as Paul instructs to do in Ephesians 4:32 which reads, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” We are to forgive as we have been forgiven.

Too often in the church, people are labeled as a result of some event in their lives and not allowed to recover from that failure. Unfortunately there is some truth in the criticism that the “church is the only organization that shoots its wounded.”

There is nothing so heinous that cannot be forgiven by God and we should not be slow to practice that same forgiveness. My guess is that if we did a better job of forgiving, our stress level would go down and our church attendance would go up.

Beware the leaven . . . thoughts on contemplative prayer

Posted on February 22, 2012 Written by Mark McIntyre Leave a Comment

There has been some discussion lately about the danger of contemplative prayer in the Church. While I understand that some proponents of this practice lean heavily on eastern religious practice and error has crept in, I am concerned that an over-reaction is taking place.

There was one group that Jesus singled out in his warnings, the Jewish religious leaders. Jesus did not say “beware the leaven of the philosophers.” Nor did he warn us against the leaven of the false religions. He warned his disciples to “beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matthew 16:6). We have been warned against the leaven of the Orthodox, the Biblically correct, the ones who should have known better. Jesus warned us against smug confidence that we have all the answers.

Now I’m not saying that orthodoxy does not have value, it does. Nor am I saying that eastern religions provide adequate answers to life, they do not and we should be wary of anyone who wants to borrow from eastern religions. We do have an obligation to be sure that our belief and practice correspond to the revealed truth of the Bible.

What I am saying is that rather than decrying the wrong ways to pray, it is more profitable to teach the valid ones. Let us not have a knee-jerk reaction to error and throw out the good with the bad.

The good part of the discussion about contemplative prayer is the move to make prayer less transactional and more relational. Too often in the prayer meetings of my youth, prayer consisted of listing situations where God’s help was required with a good bit of advice for God on how he should handle those situations.

There is mystery in prayer that much of the doctrinally correct, Bible believing church has lost over the years. Say what you want, but Psalm 46:10 tells me that I need to spend more time listening and less time talking to God. Whether you call that contemplative prayer or not, I need to stop striving and listen.

My own experience is that when I take the time to ask God to instruct me he does. When I take the time to meditate on a verse and seek deeper understanding of what it is telling me, God is faithful and often provides the insight. When I focus my attention on God, as he has revealed himself to me in Scripture, then my prayer becomes less transactional and more relational. When I am in the right mindset to listen, God answers.

When a finite human interacts with an infinite God, there is bound to be mystery. When we, being bound by time and space, interact with a God who is outside time and everywhere, there is bound to be mystery. We cannot fully understand God, our vision is like the view in a foggy mirror (1 Corinthians 13:12). We cannot take the mystery out of prayer; prayer in its very nature is mysterious.

While we cannot remove the mystery, we can confront known error. But error can only be effectively confronted by replacing it with truth. If people are looking for relationship with God through prayer, we should encourage this with the focus being on the nature of God as he has revealed himself in Scripture.

Instead of spending time condemning contemplative prayer in its entirety, we need to do the hard work of understanding what practices which claim that title are wrong, but also which are right. Our response then is to jettison the wrong and embrace the right.

We don’t want to throw out the wheat along with the chaff.

Purity of heart is the means of seeing God

Posted on February 13, 2012 Written by Mark McIntyre 2 Comments

Number 10 in the Sermon on the Mount Series

At one point in Jesus’ ministry he was accused by the Pharisees of allowing his disciples to break the tradition of the elders by eating with unwashed hands. This account is recorded In Matthew 15:1-20 and Mark 7:1-23. Jesus’ response is interesting when he declares that it is not what a man eats which defiles him, but the things which come out of his mouth are evidence of the defilement that is already inside.

Jesus is telling the Pharisees (and us) that it is the defiled heart which causes the wrong behavior. The behavior is a symptom and not a cause of impurity.

It is this context which makes the sixth Beatitude in Matthew 5:8 so interesting.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Practical Purity

In the Israel of Jesus’ day, there were many regulations regarding external purity. The nation had food regulations, commands concerning washing, laws about touching dead bodies, ceremonial cleansings and prescribed worship. When they complied with these regulations, they could claim that they had purity in their practice, or what I would call practical purity.

Modern day legalists operate in much the same way. We can have lists of things to avoid and things to do which are used as litmus tests to determine the level of purity or spirituality. If you’ve been around the church enough, you’re bound to have run into one or more of these modern day Pharisees.

This is not the purity of which Jesus is speaking of here. External purity can be produced by those who are impure in their motives. Jesus referred to them as white washed tombs that were clean on the outside but full of dead men’s bones (Matthew 23:27).

Positional purity

The purity to which Jesus refers is positional purity, or purity that is ascribed to us by God. Jeremiah tells us in Jer. 17:9 that “the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” David cried out in Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a clean heart, O God,”

We have a congenital defect, we are born with a sin nature and as A. T. Robertson tells us, “Sin befogs and beclouds the heart.” In Hebrews 12:14 we read that without purity no-one will see the Lord.

So how then can this Beatitude be fulfilled?

Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that when we are in Christ, we exchange his righteousness for our sin. In other words, we trade our impurity for his purity. We are then viewed by God as being pure.

It is only after this transaction has taken place that positional purity comes to an individual heart. It is because of this positional purity of heart that we can see God.

The Promise

This is another promise that has an immediate and an ultimate fulfillment. In Ephesians 2:4-5 Paul tells us that though we started out life dead in our sins, we are made alive in Christ. Spiritually dead people cannot see or respond to God. In Christ, however, we can begin to see God in the sense that we are aware of his presence and work in our lives. This is the immediate fulfillment.

The ultimate fulfillment comes when believers stand before God. We read in 1 John 3:2–3 we will see Jesus just as he is in his entire deific splendor. We will then be fully know and be fully known by God (1 Corinthians 13:12). What a day that will be!

Until that day, we have to be satisfied with our intermediate experience of God as our down payment on the ultimate experience. When that happens, the good will be transformed into the best.

The temptation of anger in response to militant atheism

Posted on February 1, 2012 Written by Mark McIntyre 26 Comments

In Rhode Island, Jessica Ahlquist has been the front for a lawsuit against her school district. The result of the lawsuit is that the school must remove the School Prayer
from their walls. It is also reported that threats have been made against the girl and she has been the target of verbal abuse. A photo of the prayer pulled from the linked article is shown at right.

I understand the anger at and frustration with a court system which is increasingly opposed to Christianity. I understand how difficult it is to see a militant minority run roughshod over what has been the foundation of our culture for over 200 years. So I get the anger and the desire to lash out.

I feel the need to remind myself and others of a few things in response to this.

James reminds us that we are to be “slow to anger” because “the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God.” (James 1:19-20) Nothing of eternal value will result in responding in anger.
Matthew 22:39 tells us that the second great command is to love our neighbor. Jesus used the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate who our neighbor is. This girl in Rhode Island is our neighbor and we are commanded to love her.
Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:1 that apart from Christ we are spiritually dead. We should not be surprised when spiritually dead people make spiritually dead choices.

Certainly threats and abuse toward Jessica are the wrong response on both a practical and a moral level. They accomplish nothing of temporal or eternal value.

The response of the Apostle Paul when he encountered the paganism of the Athenians is instructive here. Luke records in Acts 17:16 that Paul was provoked by the city full of idols. He was not provoked into anger, but provoked to respond with a defense of Christianity and a presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

God changes people from the inside. It is of little use for us to force change from the outside. So to do legal battle over a prayer on the wall seems like a futile effort.

We should, however, take events like this as a wakeup call. Parts of the church have engaged with the culture to the extent that their form of Christianity is almost indistinguishable from the society around it. Other parts of the church have so disengaged from the culture making themselves doctrinally pure, but irrelevant. Neither extreme puts the church in position to be effective in making disciples, the mission given to the church by Jesus.

If we live out the two great commands to love God and our neighbors, if we do this well, then we can trust that God will change us and he will use us to change our culture. Jessica needs God’s love and she needs our love, not our anger. She has plenty of that already.